Times Insider|When Jackie Married Ari: How We Reported the Wedding of the Decade

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When Jackie Married Ari: How We Reported the Wedding of the Decade

50 years ago, the queen of Camelot wed a Greek tycoon. The Times had an inside source at a ceremony that was off limits to the press. But that wasn’t our only scoop.

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Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (embracing her daughter, Caroline Kennedy) and her new husband, Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, at a reception aboard the yacht Christina shortly after their Oct. 20, 1968, wedding ceremony on the island of Skorpios, Greece.CreditCreditExpress Newspapers/Getty Images

By Alvin Shuster

Oct. 20, 2018

Times Insider delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how news, features and opinion come together at The New York Times.

The date: Oct. 20, 1968.

The bride: Jacqueline Kennedy, a president’s widow who had dominated public imagination, culture and style.

The groom: Aristotle Onassis, one of the world’s richest men, a tycoon who had risen from rags to tankers.

The venue: the Greek Orthodox chapel on Skorpios, a private and secure island in the Ionian Sea owned by the groom.

Invited guests were kept to about 20.

I was a correspondent in the London bureau when the call came to cover the event. I had covered Athens in the aftermath of Greece’s 1967 military coup. King Constantine fled the country the same day I got there. (It was nothing personal.)

In one way, the colonels who had staged the coup were easier to cover, because you knew what they would be wearing. Not so the bride.

A few days before the wedding, reporters descended on the Hotel Grande Bretagne in downtown Athens. Long tables were set up in the ballroom for portable typewriters. Tabletops, not laptops. All fine, but we could have used a working long-distance phone line or two.

Correspondents Paul Hofmann, on vacation in Rome, and Ray Anderson, on vacation on the island of Rhodes, were both asked to join the coverage. We had a staff meeting in a room overlooking the Acropolis.

Our master plan for coverage emerged.

Paul would work on background on Onassis’s business interests, which included 30 companies, as well as yachts and the jets of Olympic Airways. He also had a few mansions, penthouses and villas scattered around.

Ray would head to the impoverished island of Leukas and write a feature about its residents’ hope that the wedding on nearby Skorpios would be a boon to tourism.

Access to the wedding site was restricted. Mrs. Kennedy did not want reporters in the chapel and allegedly tried to convince the groom to drastically limit their presence on the island.

Nonetheless, the few reporters allowed outside the chapel were soon joined by a cluster of others whose small boat had capsized along the shore. Soaking, they climbed rocks in search of the wedding.

The Times lucked out. The elegant Mario Modiano, our stringer in Athens, knew everyone in Greece — from chefs in the Plaka, to sponge divers, to Onassis himself, who was a friend.

Mario was invited to the wedding.

He accepted, attended and returned to the office after the vows around midnight — truly a Greek bearing news. We sat down and went over his notes.

Yes, Mrs. Kennedy’s two children — Caroline, 10, and John, 7 — were beside the couple, holding slim white candles. And yes, she wore a beige chiffon and lace dress with a pleated knee-length skirt, designed by Valentino.

Mario had details, so the news desk in New York suggested we put together a brief sidebar with some of the color.

I had already written a four-column front-page story on the wedding that included a long section on the present and past lives of the bride and groom, and other material I had gathered before the event.

For the record, here’s my lead:

Athens, Oct. 20 — Jacqueline Kennedy became Mrs. Aristotle Socrates Onassis today in a candlelit wedding ceremony in a tiny chapel among the cypress trees on the island of Skorpios.

The 39-year-old widow of President Kennedy, two inches taller than her new husband, stood beside the 62-year-old multimillionaire during a 30-minute ceremony and gazed intently at the officiating Greek Orthodox prelate.

The event, however, was not over. Interest remained high.

Someone beat me on a story about jewels that Ari gave Jackie, and I was not happy about it. But I managed to get my own exclusive.

While sitting at the Bretagne bar, I had an accidental meeting with the bride’s hairdresser, the 29-year-old “Mr. Napoleon.” Over ouzo and with the help of a hastily hired translator, he passed along some surprising information.

Mrs. Kennedy, he told me, had very thin hair and he had to put a hairpiece in it to give it body. He also used a little hair spray, although she did not like the idea.

In my male ignorance, I dutifully reported these details as if they were no more significant than what Mrs. Kennedy ate every morning for breakfast.

The reaction was swift. My wife, Miriam, managed to get a call through from London to say that she and her friends were shocked — shocked!

To add to the excitement, Mr. Napoleon disclosed that he charged $3.50 for a shampoo and set.